This is a huge blow to both fans of
HP's
tiny little MediaSmart Servers and to Microsoft. HP was easily
the highest profile and largest shipping customer of Windows Home
Server devices and this news could very well be a death blow for the
platform.

For its part, HP says that it will
instead be focusing on bringing
out webOS products in 2011 instead of working on niche products
like MediaSmart Server. According to WeGotServed, lower than
expected sales for the servers were probably a big reason for pulling
out of the market, although the removal of Drive Extender in Vail
probably didn't do HP any favors either.

The Windows Home Server Team responded
to the news on its blog reiterating that HP will continue
selling its current MediaSmart Server products through the end of the
year and that it will continue to support its current customers.
Microsoft also explicitly denied any claims that the removal of Drive
Extender was behind the motivation of HP to abandon the platform.

The future of the Windows Home Server
platform doesn't exactly look bright now -- with HP now out of the
mix, Microsoft could only offer up Acer and Tranquil as strong
supporters of the platform.

“Vail will have a big impact on the
home media environment, providing an easy streaming and seamless
digital file sharing experience for consumers, and Acer is excited to
be alongside Microsoft delivering on this goal,” said Gianpiero
Morbello, Acer Group Corporate Vice President Marketing & Brand.

Maybe Microsoft knows something that we
don't, but Vail could very well end up meaning "Fail" come
next year.

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Yes is does.. folders are meaningless in Linux. I can slice up,mirror, resize, reduce logical volumes all day long add drives of any size into a Volume group and its instantly availabe. and i disagree with the previous poster that says its way more involved then what MS offers a few LVM commands versus a few clicks of the mouse = seconds in both cases.

I am sure it is but I recommend using Debian for learning debian based distros and LVM since its part of the install if you so choose. LVM has been around and functionally the same for ages in Unix I personally don't build a UNIX/Linux system without it. I first used it with HP-UX over a decade ago the Gnu version is pretty much identical.

My guess is they had a hard time porting it from a XP/2003 base to a Vista/Win7/2008 server since the OSes are very different.

LVM lives between the physical hardware and the Filesystem. i.e. Physical Volume(/dev/sda1)<-Logical Volume(/dev/sysvg/lv01/)<-Filesystem(ext3,ext4 resierfs etc..) There are some really cool projects that doing just that like FreeNAS and NexentaStor.

I doubt they would sell packaged products but one never knows. I don't see why someone could not purchase one of these type of NAS devices an install FreeNAS on it since its basically just a lowend PC with a ton of disk.